Business and enterprise software, and other applications that help a business run

As sad as it is to report the fact, this is that last column that I will be writing in this space, or at least the last one for pay. The owners of this blog (and many other blogs) have had a series of financial setbacks and are having to go out of business, as of today. That saddens me, because I very much like the people involved. It is my most fervent hope that they go on to bigger and better things.

A lot of the problem has been due to the loss of page rank in the Google space. It is said that it cost the blog network 70% of their traffic. With that huge number of page views missing on a daily basis, KMM simply found it impossible to make ends meet, despite most of its writers having taken a pay cut, and despite their efforts to the contrary.

This should be a lesson to those of you that are obsessed with Google traffic that Google SEO is all, or a seriously high portion, of your marketing efforts. If, for whatever reason, your Google page rank tanks and your page views take a plunge, you will find yourself in the same boat that KMM is in now. Diversify your efforts. There are about a million small (and large) non-Google things that you can do increase traffic. Do them all.

No one has ever said what it was that led to the loss of Google page rank. I am not sure that anyone knows excerpt Google, and they are not telling. Personally, I suspect that it has a lot to do with the design of the KMM page. I even went so far as to offer to redo the page and to migrate the blogs to a different platform. It is not that big a job and it is part of what I do for a living. I think, though, by the time I made the offer, the fate of the KMM network had already been decided, although it had not yet been announced.

I may continue to post in this space for a period into the future. I have a lot of ideas in my BestBizWare notes file. I suppose, in a very real way, getting those ideas out of my head and onto paper may be a good thing for me. Plus, I will assume that KMM will continue to collect revenue on my posts, and it is one of my rules in life that I give more than I receive.

I think that this blog may have been among the bright spots for KMM over the last several months. I tend to generate my own traffic, and days of 800-1000 page views have become fairly common. Google views were only a couple of percent of my totals. That knowledge allows me to go out with my head held fairly high.

But the face on that head will be sad.